Net Promoter Score: How to Win More Leads Using Smarter Customer Feedback

Let’s take a quick poll! (hey, this is a post about surveys, after all.)

How many of you actively collect quantifiable and qualitative data from your customers? If you do, you’re on the right track and major props to you…but what do you do with it?

Your customer data is vital to successful lead generation. You can measure their feedback toward your business via the Net Promoter Score (NPS.)

Before we go into what you can do with the data collected, let’s address the first group of you, who are not yet tapping into the power of your customer feedback.

What is NPS?

NPS was devised in 2003 by Bain & Company as a means to gauge customers’ feedback on the most important question of all – on a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?

From their response, you can capture valuable, quantifiable data on customer loyalty and happiness.

Responses are broken into three categories:

Promoters (9-10):Happy customers who are definitely willing to recommend your business

Passives (7-8): Somewhat happy customers, but they could easily be swayed to switch to a competitor.

Detractors (0-6):Unhappy customers who are at risk of leaving and potentially damage your brand reputation via negative word of mouth.

Going a step further, a common follow up question asks what’s the most important reason for their answer? Here’s where the qualitative data comes in.

NPS and HubSpot are a cute couple. You can import NPS data into your contact records and build segmented lists based on Promoters, Passives, and Detractors for appropriate follow-up or lead nurturing campaigns.

How to Get Leads with Customer Feedback

There are several things you can do with this data, including campaigns to turn your detractors into promoters. Today, we’re going to focus on using the data from your promoters to better refine your personas, attract the right traffic, and get referrals.

Define Better Personas

Your buyer personas should have originated from interviewing customers. You also probably interviewed your sales and support teams, but the best nuggets of information probably came from your customers themselves.

You don’t create buyer personas once and never revisit them again. You need to regularly update your personas as new data comes in to replace any initial assumptions you had when you initially got started.

Your promoters (or as we call them in Inbound, evangelists,)seem like a pretty good subset of customers to learn from, right?

These are people who obviously love your business and what you have to offer. You want more of these people! Analyze this list to glean any commonalities that can apply to your buyer personas.

Create Better Content

The responses to why your promoters are willing to promote your business provide some solid points you can leverage in your content marketing.

Understanding what’s most important to your happy customers can help you define better content topics on issues most important to your updated, better-defined personas.

Are there certain features they tout at the best part of your product/service?

Also, make sure to integrate key phrases from your customers’ feedback into your keyword strategy. With refined long-tail keyword phrases in hand, make note to adjust the following:

your on-site search engine optimization

your content, like your blog articles and content offer landing pages

you social media content and hashtags

Using the phrases your buyer personas are already using allows you to create exactly what they’re looking for.

Ask Your Promoters to Promote

This one seems pretty basic, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t do anything with their promoters. They just indicated they would definitely endorse you. Now is the time to pounce.

Before you go crazy setting up automated HubSpot workflows, take a step back and determine what you think is appropriate to have them do. What does your business need most to win new business? Consider the following three options.

1. Case Studies and Testimonials

Our major goal here at IMPACT is to create 500 success stories by 2030. This means we don’t want to just have great sales and revenue numbers - we want to have great experiences and success for our clients.

Sharing some of those stories on our website helps us show our future clients the caliber of work we do.

If you need to build your case studies or testimonials library, this may be the first thing you want to ask of your promoters. Plus, interviewing them for a case study allows you to personally get to know them on a deeper level and build an even stronger relationship.

Set up a workflow with an email asking to schedule a time to chat. If you have several promoters, don’t automate but have a template set up within HubSpot Sidekick you can easily send once you vet and select the promoters that have the best story to tell.

2. Online Reviews

Whether you’re in eCommerce, have an app, or provide a service, online reviews are very much a part of your world. After all, you can attract the right personas and spout how great you are on your website all day long, but your prospects are still going to do their own research.

This may be an area where you’re hurting and obtaining online reviews may provide a bigger impact than one singular customer referral.

Determine where you need to send promoters to review, and send an email asking for their time and kind words.

You can create a HubSpot workflow to automate this process and track who clicked through to provide a review.

3. Customer Referral

Your priority may be just to get more customers, and that’s okay. Set up a workflow to deploy immediately asking for referrals. Send an email that links to a landing page with a form that allows your happy customers to submit their friends and colleague’s information.

Since they just said they would recommend your business, odds are they will without having to get something in return. Remember, they’re happy!

Key Takeaway

We’re all about data here, and nothing beats real customer feedback. Looking beyond promoters as simple referrers opens the possibilities of more targeted marketing efforts and stronger ROI from those efforts.